Mendoza

So our last destination in Argentina (until we return in a few weeks) was the wonderful Mendoza. We absolutely loved it in Mendoza; the city is beautiful, the surroundings even more beautiful, the people we met in the hostel are some of the nicest we met so far and of course my lovely friend Juan from Mexico was there to look after us while we were there.

There is a lot of features very characteristic to Mendoza that make the city so beautiful. In 1861 Mendoza was completely destroyed by a large earthquake and the city was rebuilt in a very structured way to protect from future earthquakes. The avenues are very wide and there are many large plazas in case of evacuations. There are also no high-rise buildings so you don’t have that claustrophobia you often feel in bigger cities.

Interestingly there are trees lining almost every street; one of my favourite things about this city. I say interestingly, because like all good wine areas, Mendoza has hardly any rainfall. (Readers from England I apologise for the next sentence.) According to Juan, Mendoza did not have a single day of rain during the whole winter. Yes that means it was dry and sunny EVERY DAY in WINTER. Believe it or not there is a down side to this; Mendoza relies completely on water melting from its icy mountaintops to water the city. And everywhere you walk around there is little mini irrigation systems we thought at first were some kind of sewage system, that is used is circulate water around the city to feed the trees. It seems like a lot of effort to feed a bunch of trees but its worth it- the city is beautiful.

And as if that wasnt enough….apart from the beautiful nature surrounding the city the most famous part of Mendoza is the vineyards. The region produces 60-70% of the wine in Argentina- thats a lot of Argentinians getting drunk on Mendocino grapes 🙂 The delicious and world famous Malbec is produced here as well. This of course got us extra excited and we rented bikes one day and did a vineyard hopping tour. This was a lot of fun, but in retrospect maybe not the wisest move. Although the roads were safe, at one point Monika got so excited she not only dropped her Nikon camera she somehow managed to drive over it with her bike as well.

We also had a couple of day trips to the mountains; one featured more horses, gauchos and yet another barbeque and one roadtrip with Juan and his beautiful girlfriend Rebe (origins eastern european- of course) where I attempted to keep up with Juan’s mate drinking skills and as a result could not stop talking for hours and by the end of the evening desperately needed to pee (apparently these are normal side effects of mate drinking). By the end of our visit we were very sad to be leaving and are already planning how to visit again on the way back up!